Andersson stood aside and watched it all.
‘Take a pair of pliers and prise it open,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand this coddling. If you want to save his life you can’t treat him with kid gloves.’
Bengler didn’t reply. It would be a relief to get away from Andersson. In spite of all the help he had received, Bengler realised that he hadn’t liked him right from their very first meeting, when he was forced to poke a hole in the boil on his back. He thought that Andersson was no different from the Germans or the Portuguese or the Englishmen who tormented the blacks and hunted them like rats. Except that Andersson exercised his brutality with discretion. What difference was there between clapping a person in irons and dressing someone up in a ridiculous Swedish folk costume? He thought that he ought to tell Andersson all this, to show him, in parting, that he saw right through him. But he knew that he lacked the courage. Andersson was too strong for him. Compared to him, Bengler belonged to an insignificant caste that would never have power over the desert.
That night Benikkolua had to sleep outside the door. Bengler left the boy alone on the mattress with the plate of food by his side. Then he put out the lamp and lay down in his hammock. Unlike Benikkolua, whose breathing he could always hear, the boy was silent. A sudden apprehension made him get up. He lit the lamp. The boy was awake, but his jaws were still clamped tightly shut. Bengler placed a beam across the door and returned to his hammock.
In the morning when he woke the boy had eaten all the food. Now he was asleep. His mouth was slightly open.
Three days later Bengler made his last preparations before leaving. He had loaded and lashed down his possessions on the wagon. The boy had still not said a single word. He sat mute on the floor or in the shade with his eyes closed. Bengler stroked his head now and then. His body was very tense.
Bengler had tried to explain to Benikkolua that he had to leave. Whether she understood or not he couldn’t tell. How could he explain what an ocean was? Like expanses of sand but made out of rainwater? What was a distance, really? How far away was Sweden anyway? He realised that he would miss her, even though he didn’t know a thing about her. Her body, he knew, but not who she was.
He spent his last evening with Andersson. They ate ostrich meat boiled in a herbal stock. Andersson had brought out a pot of wine. As if to indicate that it was an important day, he had put on a clean shirt. The while time that Bengler stayed at the trading post he had never seen Andersson wash, but he had grown used to the stench and didn’t notice it any more. Andersson soon got drunk. Bengler drank cautiously. He was afraid of having a hangover the next day when he set off across the desert.
‘I just might miss your company,’ Andersson said. ‘But I know that sooner or later some other Swedish madman will come marching this way. With yet another meaningless task to perform.’
‘My task has not been meaningless. Besides, I’ve acquired a son.’
‘The hell you’ve acquired a son. You’re going to kill that boy. Maybe he’ll survive the boat trip. But then? What are you going to do then?’
‘I’ll see to it that he has a good life.’
‘How are you going to do that? Are you going to pin him down the way people pin down insects? Are you going to paste him into one of your volumes of prints?’
Bengler wanted to counter these shameless accusations, but he didn’t know how. Andersson was still too strong for him. It was their last evening, and these accusations or insults would never be repeated, they would merely fall lifeless when his wagon rolled away. Yet he would have liked to have resised him more firmly.
‘Your life is not merely peculiar,’ he said. ‘Above all, it’s miserable. You pretend to oppose what is going on in this desert. This hunting down of people who have done nothing but live in this place. You pretend to be upset, pretend to love your fellow man, pretend to be a good person. But from what I’ve seen you’re just as rotten as all the other whites here. Except for one person: myself.
‘I very seldom whip my Negroes. I don’t pinch them with tongs, don’t box their ears, don’t teach them the catechism. I do keep order, it’s true. But I don’t rip them up by the roots so they’ll fall dead in the snow of Sweden. I ask you a very simple question: which is worse?’
‘I’ll prove you’re wrong.’
‘You have given me your promise. To come back. And tell me.’
They ate the rest of the dinner in silence. Andersson was soon so drunk that his gaze began to wander beyond the light from the whale-oil lamp. It struck Bengler that he resembled a confused insect at night, searching for a point of light that should not have been there.
That night, as his last note to Matilda, he wrote: Tomorrow I set off. Andersson fluttered like a moth around the lamp. I don’t know if he is an evil man. But he is a foolish man. He refuses to see through his own actions. Because I drank two glasses of wine I began to fantasise that he was actually an insect that I had pinned down on a sheet of white paper.
He still hadn’t made a single note about Daniel. He had decided to wait until they left. When the trading post disappeared behind them he would begin to write about him.
Daniel was sleeping on the rug. His mouth was still shut tight. Bengler wondered what he was dreaming about.
Despite the fact that he was tipsy and had also had to drag Andersson to bed, he managed to have one last moment of love with Benikkolua that night. He had stumbled out of the room where the ivory was once stored and tripped over her where she lay on her raffia mat. As usual she was naked under her thin cover. He was surprised that she never seemed to be chilly in the cold desert night.
In the morning he woke very early. The sun had not yet risen. Daniel was asleep. Bengler went silently out of the door. Benikkolua was gone. She had taken her raffia mat with her. But she had hung up the thin cover on a projecting edge of the roof. It waved like a farewell to him, Benikkolua’s flag. It brought tears to his eyes and he thought it was as crazy for him to leave as it had once been to come here.
He had just as many questions, and just as few answers.
He was sure of one thing. The responsibility he had assumed for the boy lying in Andersson’s pen was something he did not intend to regret. What he wasn’t able to give himself perhaps he could give to someone else.
Bengler waited until Daniel woke up, then he smiled, put his best shirt on him and carried him outside. When Daniel caught sight of the wagon with the oxen hitched up, he suddenly began to shriek and flail about. Bengler held him tight, but the boy was like a wildcat. When he sank his teeth into Bengler’s nose he had to let him go. The boy ran straight out into the desert. Bengler followed him with blood running down his face.
For an instant he thought he would have to hit him, but when he caught the boy the thought was already gone. He was still howling and flailing his arms but this time Bengler didn’t let go, and dragged him back to the wagon. He tied him down with the baggage, just as he had once bound Amos and the other ox-driver to the wagon wheels. The boy pulled and tore at the rope, and his screams cut through Bengler like knives, but he couldn’t change his mind now.
Andersson had come out onto the steps and was watching the commotion.
‘I see you’re leaving,’ he shouted. ‘A quiet departure. I just don’t understand why you have to torment the boy. What has he done to you?’
Bengler rushed towards Andersson. Now he had no more fear.
‘I intend to save him from you.’
Then he threw himself on Andersson. They rolled about in the sand. Andersson had met the attack with a roar. Around them stood black people silently watching the white men fighting like madmen.
Then it was over. Andersson knocked Bengler to the ground with a punch to the stomach. It took several minutes before he caught his breath.
‘Leave now. But come back and tell me how the boy died.’
Andersson turned and went into the house. In the wagon the boy continued screaming and tearing at the rope. Bengler wiped the blood
off his face and called to the ox-drivers.
The black men stood silent.
For a moment Bengler thought he had made a mistake.
But he quickly dispensed with the thought.
The boy didn’t stop crying until late in the afternoon. He fell completely silent suddenly, without warning, and closed his eyes with his mouth shut tight.
Will I ever understand what he’s thinking? Walking beside the wagon, Bengler watched him for a long time. Then he loosened the rope. The boy didn’t move. He knows that I wish him only the best, thought Bengler. It will take time. But already he is beginning to understand.
When they reached Cape Town a few weeks later, Bengler heard that Wackman was dead. He had had a stroke at his brothel, which had now been taken over by a man from Belgium.
Daniel had stopped shrieking. He didn’t speak and never smiled, but he ate the food Bengler gave him. Yet Bengler was still uncertain whether he might try to escape again, so he always tied him up at night and kept the end of the rope wound around his own wrist.
In early July they boarded a French freighter, a barque, that was bound for Le Havre. The captain, whose name was Michaux, promised that there would be no difficulty in finding a ship there to take them to Sweden. The money that Bengler got for the wagon and the oxen paid for their passage.
Late in the evening of 7 July 1877, they set sail from Cape Town. Bengler was afraid that Daniel would throw himself overboard, the way the slaves used to do, so he made sure he was tied up when they were standing by the railing.
Daniel kept his eyes closed.
Bengler wondered what he was seeing behind those eyelids of his.
CHAPTER 7
The ship was called the Chansonette and had come most recently from Goa on the Indian peninsula. Steamy aromas of mysterious spices that Bengler had never smelled before wafted up from the holds. When he took a promenade on deck he discovered some strange iron fittings screwed into the planks. At first he couldn’t identify them other than as vague images from his memory. Then he remembered that he had once seen them in a comprehensive English book of plates that illustrated in detail the instruments and tools with which slaves were held captive during the journey to the West Indies. So he found himself on a former slave ship. It aroused a violent discomfort in him. The scrubbed deck was suddenly filled with blood that smelled stronger than the spices loaded in sacks and barrels down in the holds. He looked at Daniel, whom he was leading on a rope. So that Daniel wouldn’t tear himself loose in one of the quick and always unexpected lunges he made at irregular intervals, Bengler had designed a harness for him. He had explained to the captain that Daniel was his adopted son and was going with him to Europe. Michaux hadn’t asked any questions or shown the least sign of curiosity. Bengler asked him to inform the crew that Daniel’s unpredictable moods made it necessary to keep him in a harness: it was a safety measure, not a display of cruelty. Michaux called over one of his mates, a Dutchman named Jean, and asked him to tell the crew.
They had been given a cabin near the stern, right next to the captain’s quarters. After attempting to break free in a violent fit of desperation, Daniel had sunk into apathy. To calm him, Bengler had strewn a thin layer of sand on the floor. He had tried to explain that the ship was big and safe. The sea was no monster, the slight motion of the hull nothing more than the same motion that Daniel must have felt when he was carried around on his mother’s back.
A young ship’s boy, barely fifteen years old, had been assigned by Michaux to take care of the five passengers on board. Along on the journey were an elderly bachelor who had terrible smallpox scars on his face, and a very young lady who immediately became the object of the crew’s lustful glances. Except for the fact that the man’s name was Stephen Hartlefield, Bengler knew nothing about him or to what he had devoted his life. Captain Michaux had brusquely informed Bengler that the pockmarked man was an Englishman with cancer in his belly, and he was going home to Devonshire to die.
‘He came to Africa when he was two years old,’ said Michaux. ‘Yet he still talks about travelling home to die in a country that he has no memory of. Englishmen are very strange creatures.’
The young lady, whose name was Sara Dubois, had been visiting one of her sisters who lived on a big farm outside Cape Town. She belonged to a well-to-do merchant family from Rouen and had a chambermaid with her.
The cabin boy’s name was Raul. He was freckled, cross-eyed and alert. Bengler noticed that Daniel watched him for a moment, and caught his eye.
Raul asked why Daniel was being restrained.
‘Otherwise he might jump overboard,’ Bengler answered, feeling despondent about his reply. Something made him feel ashamed that he had to keep a fellow human being tied up. A human being that he regarded as his son.
‘Will he always be tied up?’ Raul asked.
Instead of replying, Bengler called over one of the mates and complained about the cabin boy’s nosy curiosity. The mate boxed him twice on the ears.
Raul didn’t cry, even though the blows were very hard.
They left Cape Town in the evening. Heavy rain clouds swept in over Tafelberg. Bengler had decided to keep Daniel in the cabin as they pulled away from land and not let him out until they were on the high seas. The sea was very calm that night and slow swells bore the ship away from the African continent. Daniel slept in the hammock. Bengler had tied the rope to one of the ceiling beams. Even though it was a low ceiling, Daniel wouldn’t be able to reach the beam and untie it. Bengler had also checked that there were no sharp objects in the cabin that he could use to cut himself loose.
When Bengler placed a blanket over Daniel he discovered that in one hand, which was clenched tightly, he held some sand that he had picked up off the floor.
That first evening Bengler began to sew a sailor’s costume for Daniel. He had procured the cloth from a nautical outfitter recommended by Michaux. Since he had spent all his money on the passage, he bartered for the cloth with the revolver he had bought in Copenhagen. It had also sufficed for buttons, needle and thread. He borrowed scissors from the sailmaker on board. He spread out the cloth on the table in the cabin and then pondered for a long time over how he could actually make a pair of trousers and a sailor’s blouse. It took a while before he dared begin cutting. He had never before in his life made anything like this. The work proceeded slowly, and he pricked himself with the scissors and the needle that he used to sew together the various pieces. Late that night, as he crept up into his hammock next to Daniel, he hid the scissors in a cavity between two timbers up in the ceiling.
Before he went to sleep he lay still and listened to Daniel’s breathing. It was irregular and restless. He felt Daniel’s forehead but could detect no sign of fever. He’s dreaming, he thought. Some day he’ll be able to tell me what he was thinking when we left Cape Town.
The odours from the holds were very strong. In the distance he could hear some of the sailors laughing. Then it was quiet again apart from occasional footsteps on deck and the ship creaking against the swells.
The journey to Le Havre took a little over a month. They went through two storms and were becalmed for six days in between them. The African continent could be glimpsed now and then like an evasive mirage in the east. The heat was relentless. The captain was worried about his cargo of spices and several times went below deck to check that nothing was getting damp.
On the very first day Bengler had decided that Daniel needed a routine. After eating the breakfast that Raul brought in to them, they began taking walks on deck. The man from Devonshire seldom appeared. According to Raul he was in severe pain and ate almost nothing but strong medicines, which left him constantly in a trance-like state. The merchant’s daughter from Rouen played badminton with her chambermaid when the weather permitted. Bengler noticed that the ship then seemed to breathe in a different way. The crew devoutly hoped that the girls’ skirts would blow up and expose a leg or perhaps a bit of their undergarments. During their walks, B
engler talked to Daniel constantly. He pointed and explained and alternated speaking German and Swedish. Slowly he thought he could feel the tension in Daniel begin to relax. He was still somewhere else, with parents who were still alive, far away from Andersson’s pen and the ship that rose and fell, but he’s getting closer, Bengler thought. The further away from Africa, the closer to me.
Bengler realised that he had to show Daniel that the harness was a temporary solution for what he hoped would be an equally temporary problem. The rope situation could only be solved by a growing trust. On the second day aboard, Bengler left the scissors he had borrowed from the sailmaker on the table and let Daniel stay alone in the cabin. He waited outside the closed door, ready for Daniel to cut the rope and then rush out of the door to try to cast himself into the sea.
After half an hour nothing had happened.
When Bengler went into the cabin the scissors lay on the table. Daniel was sitting on the floor drawing with his finger in the sand that still covered the floorboards. Bengler decided to take the harness off the boy. The feeling that he had committed an injustice filled him once again with discomfort. But he also experienced something that could only be vanity. He didn’t want to admit that Wilhelm Andersson was right. That he should not have taken the boy with him. He didn’t want to have his good intentions questioned, even if only by a man he would never meet again. A man who lived in the midst of far-reaching hypocrisy at a remote trading post in the Kalahari Desert.
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